If I close my eyes forever
MoviePass is back, not because it makes any sense as a business — the theater chains offer their own frequent-viewer discounts now — but likely because there is chance that some value can be squeezed from it as a meme. So naturally, as the Verge reports here, it is now going to be "powered by Web3 technology." NFTs are surely imminent as well. It sounds as though it will run on some sort of tradeable token scheme, which one can easily imagine becoming increasingly detached from people going to the movies and become a purely speculative instrument.
The company's original CEO is returning, and he told the Verge that he plans to "run the business like a 'co-op.'" I cant figure out what that means or why it would make sense for a company that doesn't make anything or seem to do anything but resell tickets at a loss. Most likely it is catering to the sort of people who think it's fun to own GameStop stock.
It seems like MoviePass has become a free-floating signifier that gets attached to whatever is the most terrible or infeasible or indefensible tech idea at any given moment. Matt Levine sardonically described its original incarnation as "the greatest business model of the 2010s venture capital boom," which was premised on a firm subsidizing free stuff for customers until all its competitors are driven out of business. This is usually done under the guise of some techiness that made giveaways seem like "innovation" rather than monopolistic foul play. In 2018, the New York Times's Kevin Roose somewhat hyperbolically claimed that "the entire economy is MoviePass now," pointing to then nonprofitable companies like Uber and Spotify.
Of course, there was nothing particularly "technological" about MoviePass: You signed up and the company gave you money to buy movie tickets. But MoviePass also didn't have any competitors to drive out of business, and, as Levine explained, it didn't have the VC money to play the loss-leader game. It was ostensibly supposed to make money by harvesting already readily available data about moviegoers, but its strategy in actual practice seems to have been to collect subscription fees, not provide the promised service, and then make it impossible for victims to log on to its site to cancel it. It was basically an exit scam without crypto; the tech innovation was to have system administrators apparently change users' passwords behind their back.
MoviePass's new business model adds a wrinkle to the pyramid scheme: To earn MoviePass credits, customers can have their eyeballs tracked as they watch ads — play to earn! Talk about the cinematic mode of production:
Capitalized machinic interfaces prey on vision. Recently, corporations such as FreePC, which during the NASDAQ glory days gave out ‘free’ computers in exchange for recipients’ agreement to supply extensive personal information and to spend a certain amount of time online, strove to demonstrate in practice that looking at a screen can produce value.
Jonathan Beller wrote that in 2003, so perhaps the MoviePass economy is older than we realized. "The cinematic mode of production becomes the necessary means of extending the workday while reducing real wages," he argues. From that point of view, getting paid for watching images with the chance to watch even more images, is like going double-or-nothing and losing. We might be able to turn the work of our personal viewing into ephemeral personal pleasure, but only companies can aggregate that work and industrialize it, use it for lucrative consciousness-shaping schemes. Watching a movie is craft production, letting MoviePass buy your ticket is an attempt to turn it into factory labor.